The Middle East

Israel's prime minister

Bad bets

ISRAEL'S prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, suffered not one but two vicarious electoral defeats on Tuesday. Twice this week he has had to swallow hard and congratulate candidates he hoped would lose. The winners were equally cordial to him on the phone. If they enjoyed his discomfiture, they concealed it well. Politics is about interests, not likes and dislikes, and Mr Netanyahu is firmly on course to victory in Israel's upcoming election, on January 22.

Bibi's more famous wrong horse, of course, was Barack Obama. The Israeli leader is taking flak at home and abroad for his unconcealed preference for Mitt Romney, an old friend and political kindred spirit.

Less resonant around the world, but no less stinging in Israel, was the bad bet Mr Netanyahu placed in the leadership election of a small but important Israeli party, Habayit Hayehudi [The Jewish Home]. The challenger, Naftali Bennett, served as bureau chief to Mr Netanyahu when he led the opposition from 2006-2008. Mr Bennett managed to fall foul both of his boss and his powerful wife, Sara. The Netanyahus pulled every string they could to foil Mr Bennett's bid to enter politics, but to no avail. He won by a margin of 2-1 among Habayit Hayehudi's 54,000 members. “It reminded me of my own victory in the Likud primaries in 1993,” Mr Netanyahu cooed down the line to Mr Bennett on Wednesday. It was the first time they had talked in more than three years.

Both presume they will be talking a great deal across the cabinet table after the January election. Habayit, with its three Knesset seats, is a junior partner in Mr Netanyahu’s coalition. Mr Bennett intends to transform it into a major one, becoming a senior minister himself along the way. “You’ll be prime minister again,” he told Mr Netanyahu. "No doubt about that now that you've teamed up with [Avigdor] Lieberman."

Mr Netanyahu and Mr Lieberman, the foreign minister, recently surprised Israeli pundits and public alike by announcing that their two parties, Likud and Yisrael Beitenu, would merge and run in the election as a single block. Their purpose is to ensure that Mr Netanyahu emerges as the head of the largest faction, giving the president, Shimon Peres, no pretext to call on a more moderate contender to try and form a government. (So far the 89-year-old Mr Peres has resisted pressure to stand down as president and run in the election at the head of a list of centre-left parties which might beat Mr Netanyahu’s block.)

Mr Bennett has told his supporters that while in government he intends to make sure that Mr Netanyahu makes no mistakes: "the Land of Israel is not up for trading or concession." A one-time head of the Judea and Samaria Settlers Council, he is an unabashed annexationist. Under his leadership, Habayit Hayehudi (formerly called the National Religious Party) will unequivocally oppose the two-state solution.

Mr Netanyahu, who professes to support the establishment of a Palestinian state, will be able to argue that he is hemmed in by his hardline coalition partners and so unable to offer any concessions to the Palestinians, or even negotiate with them. He has hewed to much the same line over the past four years. Mr Obama, after some early attempts to budge him, gave up trying. Now, free of political and electoral pressures, he will have to decide whether to try again.

Israel, with its illegal settlement policy, is on a death course. The two state solution is now irretrievably dead. That leaves only two choices - 1) a single state with equal rights for all (not paper rights, real civil and political rights) or 2) openly brazen apartheid. The first will eventually mean the end of the Jewish state and the second means the end of the democratic state. Israel must now choose its future. With his alignment with the fascist Lieberman, Netanyahu has clearly made his choice. Obama did all he could to help Israel to avoid the impending train wreck. Without the financial, military and diplomatic cover provided by the US, Israel , in its present form cannot continue. There are many subtle ways for Obama to get back at Bibi..

It is interesting to speculate on the impact on the Israeli election if President Obama decided to return Netanyahu's (non-)support. Call for Bibi to formally embrace a two state solution and lay out steps to get there. And, when he does not, formally extend diplomatic recognition to Palestine anyway. Before the Israeli elections.

It would be a stark wake-up call. Israelis know that the worst thing that could happen to their country would be for the US to decide to walk away from them. That isn't going to happen, of course. But just that diplomatic step would have a lot of Israeli voters re-evaluating just how bad for their most critical alliance Netanhayu is being.

You need to keep your Prime Minister on a shorter leash when he's traveling abroad. His antics before the U.S. congress may have gone unnoticed in Israel, but those arrogant attempts to go over the President's head cost Israel a lot of support in the U.S.

Of course he was ignored by Obama. The president has more important things to do than kowtow to the leaders of insignificant countries. Mr Netanyahu would have been taken more seriously if he hadn't been so belligerent from the start.

Obama has been very good for Israel. Any US president has to safeguard the overall interests of the USA in Asia. Israel must learn that it is a very minor part of the whole picture in Asia. The main issues that divide Bibi and Obama are Iran and an independent state for the people of Palestine. On both issues he has the support of the whole world, US voters, one of the main Jewish opinion groups (the J Street movement) and all liberal US Jews. For a Jewish view on the Iran issue, see below:

The people of Israel must learn that it has decided to live in Asia - it must gain acceptance from Asian countries or face the consequences - i.e., live like an apartheid state like South Africa used to be.

On the issue of global public opinion, I think you have not traveled much in either Asia or Europe. The reality is as follows:

On Iran:

- The Gulf states are small kingdoms - their "royal families" feel threatened by Iran. On a military strike on Iran, the economically and militarily significant countries in Asia are: Russia, China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. None of them support a military strike against Iran.

On a homeland for the people of Palestine:

- Put this issue to a vote in the UN - this should be done anyway. You will find that out of 192 member states/countries of the UN, at least 175 countries would vote for an independent state for the Palestinians - i.e., over 95% of the population of the world.

A history lesson from you is not needed - you need a reality check about what the world is actually thinking about these issues. "They need acceptance from nobody" - your comment. That is what the apartheid supporters in South Africa used to say for decades. Till world opinion made them change their mind - apartheid collapsed within a short time. Israel is also running an apartheid regime - and constantly counting on US support - and a US veto in the UN. What will happen when the national interests of the USA make its foreign policy "neutral" or "anti-Israel"??? Israel will surely collapse.

I do not know why Jewish people are so anti-British. They did a lot for the Jews - e.g., the Balfour declaration, WW2, the illegal attack on Egypt in 1956, etc. The only issue the Brits did try and prevent was Jewish terrorism. I am sure that you are aware that there was systematic ethnic cleansing being done by Jewish terrorist organizations.

"In 1947, there were 630,000 Jews and 1,300,000 Palestinian Arabs. Thus, by the time of the United Nations partition of Palestine in 1947, the Jews were 31% of the population.

The decision to partition Palestine, promoted by the leading imperialist powers and Stalin’s Soviet Union, gave 54% of the fertile land to the Zionist movement. But before the state of Israel was established, the Irgun and Haganah seized three-quarters of the land and expelled virtually all the inhabitants.

In 1948, there were 475 Palestinian villages and towns. Of these, 385 were razed to the ground, reduced to rubble. Ninety remain, stripped of their land."

"In 1940, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, which was responsible for the actual organization of settlements in Palestine, wrote:

Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries - all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left.

There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument: ... the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish ... with a non-Jewish minority limited to fifteen percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary.

The Koenig Report stated this policy even more bluntly:

We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.

Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, declaimed: “We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.”

These are the words of Uri Lubrani, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs, in 1960: “We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters.”

Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Armed Forces stated:

We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel ... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.

Eitan elaborated before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee:

When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle."

"The territorial ambitions of Zionism were clearly spelled out by David Ben Gurion in a speech to a Zionist meeting on October 13, 1936: “We do not suggest that we announce now our final aim which is far reaching – even more so than the Revisionists who oppose Partition. I am unwilling to abandon the great vision, the final vision which is an organic, spiritual and ideological component of my ... Zionist aspirations.”

In the same year, Ben Gurion wrote in a letter to his son:

A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning. I am certain that we can not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country and the region.

In 1937, he declaimed:

“The boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.” [47] In 1938, he was more explicit: “The boundaries of Zionist aspiration,” he told the World Council of Poale Zion in Tel Aviv, “include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today’s Jordan, all of Cis-Jordan [West Bank] and the Sinai.”

Ben Gurion formulated Zionist strategy very clearly:

After we become a strong force as the result of the creation of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine. The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion. The state will have to preserve order – not by preaching but with machine guns."

"this has been clearly determined by international law. It is high time we all leaned to live by it" - your comment. Art. 80 of the UN charter is not really relevant. The more relevant document is Resolution 181 and Resolution 186. On 20 May 1948, Folke Bernadotte was appointed "United Nations Mediator in Palestine", in accordance with UN-resolution 186 of 14 May 1948. He finalized his proposals on September 16, 1948:

"1. Peace must return to Palestine and every feasible measure should be taken to ensure that hostilities will not be resumed and that harmonious relations between Arab and Jew will ultimately be restored.
2. A Jewish State called Israel exists in Palestine and there are no sound reasons for assuming that it will not continue to do so.
3 The boundaries of this new State must finally be fixed either by formal agreement between the parties concerned or failing that, by the United Nations.
4. Adherence to the principle of geographical homogeneity and integration, which should be the major objective of the boundary arrangements, should apply equally to Arab and Jewish territories, whose frontiers should not therefore, be rigidly controlled by the territorial arrangements envisaged in the resolution of 29 November.
5. The right of innocent people, uprooted from their homes by the present terror and ravages of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return.
6. The City of Jerusalem, because of its religious and international significance and the complexity of interests involved, should be accorded special and separate treatment.
7. International responsibility should be expressed where desirable and necessary in the form of international guarantees, as a means of allaying existing fears, and particularly with regard to boundaries and human rights."

The next day he was assassinated by "members of the Jewish nationalist Zionist group Lehi (commonly known as the Stern Gang or Stern Group)". Many of the people who were involved in his murder were members of the Israeli government later. "A three man 'center' of this extreme Jewish group had approved the killing: Yitzhak Yezernitsky (the future Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir), Nathan Friedmann (also called Natan Yellin-Mor) and Yisrael Eldad (also known as Scheib). A fourth leader, Emmanuel Strassberg (Hanegbi) was also suspected by the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion of being part of the group that had decided on the assassination. The assassination was planned by the Lehi operations chief in Jerusalem, Yehoshua Zettler. A four-man team ambushed Bernadotte's motorcade in Jerusalem's Katamon neighborhood. Two of them, Yitzhak Ben Moshe (Markovitz) and Avraham Steinberg, shot at the tires of the UN vehicles. A third, Yehoshua Cohen, opened the door of Bernadotte's car and shot him at close range."

New York Times wrote that Shamir was one of the murderers: "One of those spirits, she says, signed his death warrant. He was part of a troika that led Lehi after its guiding force, Avraham Stern, was killed by the British in 1942. His name was Yitzhak Yezernitsky, a short bulldog of an immigrant from the Russian-Polish border. Four decades later, he became Israel's Prime Minister under the name Yitzhak Shamir."

"It is tempting to note that right after the Bernadotte killing, the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, outlawed Lehi as "a gang of rogues, cowards and low schemers," and ordered that scores of its people be rounded up. Within five months, he had declared an amnesty and released them all. A few years later, Ben-Gurion moved to a kibbutz in the Negev. One of his closest friends there was a much younger man named Yehoshua Cohen."

It is strange that a country whose political leaders are assassins talks about international law. Murder and assassination have been routinely practiced by Israel from the pre-Israel period till now. It is obviously a perverse kind of Stockholm syndrome - i.e., the Jews use identical tactics like Nazi Germany used against the Jews. I presume that this may be the main reason why historically the Jews got kicked out of every European country. In legal terms, the borders of Israel are based on Resolution 181 - to save space, I will send you the legal opinion of the ICJ on this issue later today.

Resolution 242 is the operative document. Israel does not want to implement the crucial withdrawal provisions - see below:

"This full-withdrawal requirement of international law has been reinforced by the
International Court of Justice. In its seminal 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Legal
Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,90 the
Court expressly cited Resolution 242’s emphasis of the inadmissibility principle.91 It also
stated that: “[A]ll these territories (including East Jerusalem) remain occupied territories
and Israel has continued to have the status of occupying Power.”92 Several paragraphs
later, the International Court expressly endorsed the prevailing international law precept
that prohibits the territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force.93 Taken
together, these comments by the International Court of Justice point in one direction only:
all of the territories captured by Israel in 1967 are deemed to be occupied, and Israel
cannot assert a lawful claim of territorial sovereignty over any of these occupied lands."

There are dozens of international legal opinions on this issue - this one is from S. Michael Lynk, University of Western Ontario - Faculty of Law.

There are several UN resolutions after (and, in addition to) 242 - they should also be implemented. Where there is a dispute, it can be referred to the ICJ for a legal judgement - that is a global legal forum.

"so long as it is situated on ANY part of the Jewish people's ancestral homeland" - your comment. How do you propose to define what is an ancestral homeland?? The definitions that I have seen from various comments by Israeli right-wing commentators in TE are based entirely on ancient texts written 40-50 centuries ago. In most countries, title to land is recorded. "The Napoleonic code was among the first government acts of modern times to introduce the notion of absolute ownership into statute. Furthermore, protection of personal property rights was present in medieval Islamic law and jurisprudence, and in more feudalist forms in the common law courts of medieval and early modern England." Therefore, relying on old books to override legal land title documents is an awful precedent in common law and this cannot be tolerated in the 21st century by any known norm of contemporary jurisprudence and recorded practices of global property law. It will lead to absurd title disputes on a global basis. Therefore, the discussion has to be done without any reference to ancient texts whose authorship is dubious and unverifiable. Gone are the days of apartheid whereby land owned by the people of Palestine can be expropriated by "clever" interpretations of law and by creating a system of "no go" areas. The world is a more secular place and theocratic states are a relic of the past.

In most countries, title to land is recorded. "The Napoleonic code was among the first government acts of modern times to introduce the notion of absolute ownership into statute. Furthermore, protection of personal property rights was present in medieval Islamic law and jurisprudence, and in more feudalist forms in the common law courts of medieval and early modern England." Therefore, relying on old books to override legal land title documents is an awful precedent in common law and this cannot be tolerated in the 21st century by any known norm of contemporary jurisprudence and recorded practices of global property law. It will lead to absurd title disputes on a global basis. Therefore, the discussion has to be done without any reference to ancient texts whose authorship is dubious and unverifiable.

How can valid title to land be granted to any ethnic group in the world based on a book written 30-40 centuries ago by an author whose existence is unproven and, therefore, doubtful?? How can such a land title ever be considered legally valid???

Why wouldn't he be ignored by Obama? Barrack Hussein Obama is the President of the United States of America, not merely Israel's lapdog. Israel is an ally, but in the end, it's still essentially insignificant compared to Japan or the UK, and it's sure as hell insignificant compared to domestic matters. To the president, and rightly so, the USA's interests come before Israel's, and the two do not always intersect.

Especially since Netanyahu hasn't made a single honest attempt at compromise and peacemaking in his life.

"Israel is governed based on its legal system that also incorporates international law, bi-lateral and multilateral agreements with other countries and organizations" - your comment. Then why has Israel refused to sign the NPT?? And why does Israel have 400 illegal nuclear warheads?? And why is Israel keen to take unilateral military action against Iran, which has signed the NPT?? And why does Israel not refer these issues to the UN, if Israel has any respect for international law??

Why do we obsess so much about the Israelis? They are just another bunch of religious extremists. That they can blackmail us, and make Jewish Americans forget their loyalty to the US is beyond question .... maybe we should impose sanctions on them, to match the Iranian sanctions, to let people know that we do not base our friendships on race, religion or national origin.